The day is finally here, the day that the GNOME team releases GNOME 3.0, the first major revision of the GNOME project since 2002. Little of GNOME 2.x is left in GNOME 3.0, and as such, you could call it GNOME's KDE4. We're living in fortunate times, what, with two wildly divergent open source desktops.

The whole drawing, theme, and input system in gtk3 was overhauled. That's huge! Almost as huge as the change from qt3 to qt4. The changes open possibilities for real animation and composite framework something that was almost impossible in gtk2.

But at the same time GTK+3 is a whole lot more source compatible than qt3 to qt4 was - as long as you followed the GTK+ 'general rule of thumb' your application might need a tweak here and there but it would pale in comparison to what the transition from qt3 to qt4 required.

Well you may have a point. But developers who maintain an application larger than "Hello World" would definitely have their work cut out for them.

I can't remember the details of the changes needed to port from QT3 to QT4, but I do know for most gtk developers (especially the ones that use the language bindings, there are lots of them these days) would definitely need to do a rewrite of their apps.

Well you may have a point. But developers who maintain an application larger than "Hello World" would definitely have their work cut out for them.

I can't remember the details of the changes needed to port from QT3 to QT4, but I do know for most gtk developers (especially the ones that use the language bindings, there are lots of them these days) would definitely need to do a rewrite of their apps.

I kind of wonder where OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice fits into the equation given that there is a degree of GTK+/GNOME integration but how much of a PITA is it going to be with the migration from gtk2 to gtk3. I've always wondered to what extent is the open source world better off stripping off the abstraction layer from OpenOffice.org/lIbreOffice in favour of replacing it with native front ends as to have the best native experience rather than the half baked pseudo integration that exists today.

IIRC a lot of the applications have already done the preparation work mentioned in the documentation with the last part of the migration being pretty straight forward. Although I am seeing GNOME and many open source projects becoming more and more 'Linux centric' with the lack of contributions by non-Linux developers (why isn't there a native FreeBSD backend to the GNOME features that hook back into the system?) but in the long run if it means consolidation where Linux becomes a strong number 3 competitor in the desktop world then hopefully it'll translate into more vendors will to consider providing software on said platform.

With that being said, others have pointed out that GNOME 3.x has become more of a a complete platform for developers to aim against with the desktop abstracting things such as Bluetooth and printing which should mean application writers aim for the GNOME desktop and the GNOME desktop API's take care of the rest. If GNOME keep working down this road then I see in the long term third parties seeing it as a viable environment to target.

"Thankfully, most of the changes are not hard to adapt to and there are a number of steps that you can take to prepare your GTK+ 2.x application for the switch to GTK+ 3. After that, there's a small number of adjustments that you may have to do when you actually switch your application to build against GTK+ 3."